


Angel on the Outward Side

by LondonBelowsNo1FloatingMarket (QuokkaMocha)



Category: Neverwhere - All Media Types, Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Anal Sex, Angel Sex, BDSM, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Cock & Ball Torture, Cock Bondage, Flogging, Imprisonment, M/M, Nipple Torture, Non-Consensual Bondage, Porn With Plot, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rope Bondage, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 08:41:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30086424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuokkaMocha/pseuds/LondonBelowsNo1FloatingMarket
Summary: "Whoever possesses an angel can remake the world as he sees fit" - the proverb has been going around London Below for ages, or so everyone says, and since there are also rumours that an injured angel is for sale at the Floating Market, the Marquis de Carabas isn't going to miss an opportunity to gain a bit of extra power.(Ratings, tags etc mostly apply from chapter 2 onwards).
Relationships: Islington/Marquis de Carabas
Kudos: 1





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after the events of Neverwhere and How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. I'm basing this mainly on the TV series and the text of the 'author's preferred edition' novel. Warnings for a lot of non-con stuff from chapter 2 onwards. 
> 
> First time writing this kind of thing so let me know what you think, and enjoy!

_O, what may man within him hide,_

_Though angel on the outward side!_

_How may likeness made in crimes,_

_Making practise on the times,_

_To draw with idle spiders’ strings_

_Most ponderous and substantial things!_

William Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure_ , Act 3 Sc 2.

1.

The Floating Market was at Alexandra Palace that evening. Streams of figures, indistinct and shapeless in the night, made their way up the hill through the park towards the Victorian exhibition centre, heading for a fire door on the western side, like ants headed for a dropped sandwich at a picnic. Inside, the great hall was more like the hollow under an overturned stone, writhing with bodies that jostled in all directions around the myriad stalls and tables. Hawkers called out their wares over the fog of murmured conversation. Meat hissed as its fat hit the fire below it. Tunes from a dozen different musicians wrestled into a big ball of cacophonic noise.

One figure passed by it all as if he were the only being in existence, and as if sensing that his presence was much larger than his physical being, most people gave him a wide berth. The Marquis de Carabas, in his newly recovered and quite magnificent black coat, moved among them at an easy pace, as if he were out for a stroll in the park that rolled away from the palace down to Crouch End. He managed to exude an aura of alertness, eyes keen and pecking at details of the vendors, their wares, their customers, while he also, paradoxically, gave the impression that he couldn’t care less about any of it. Watchful nonchalance was something he’d perfected, part of the self he’d created.

He waved away an offer of discounted manuscripts from the seller of unpublished novels, whose stall always smelled of sweat, despair and cheap whisky, and ignored the old woman selling ‘the finest cat burgers in London Below’ as she tried to waft said item under his nose. He dismissed the man from the booth that sold jewellery made from old Oyster cards and sidestepped the vendor who specialised in guidebooks to places Above that no longer existed. Keeping the same, languid pace, he passed by each stand and tent and table in turn, giving no more than a glance to each, until at last, and suddenly, he halted. A wide smile spread over his face and a gleam lit up his dark eyes, that of an owl hearing the rustle of a mouse in the field below.

Quicker now, he made for an area behind a cluster of tattoo artists, fortune tellers and blacksmiths, where some space had been left empty and a small crowd had gathered to watch what was going on there. The Marquis watched as a tall woman paced around the area, reeling off her patter to the audience, though he deliberately focused on the background noise of the hall so as to blot out what she was saying. She was broadly built and dressed in a long coat that seemed to be made of a patchwork of different garments sewn together, some with the sleeves still attached and flapping as she moved like loose pieces of skin. Beside her stood a tiny creature, so skinny and dishevelled it was impossible for the Marquis to discern age or gender. All he could make out was that the person was pale, dirty and undernourished, dressed in rags that, even amongst the generally tatty attire of London Below, looked shabby and pitiful.

The Marquis despised this part of the market and allowed himself a sneer, while he was still out of sight of the sellers, while they were still occupied with addressing the crowd and making their pitch. It irked him that he would have to deal with these people, but there you are. Some foul things were necessary in order to reach the end goal, like dipping one’s hand into a sewer to retrieve a nugget of gold. Though, thought the Marquis, comparing these people to a sewer was an insult to the Sewer People. This was the Floating Market’s small, but still distastefully popular, slave market and the large woman had about half a dozen pathetic souls, probably newly dropped into the world beneath and behind the streets of London Above, waiting to be shown to their potential abusers. Admittedly, this distaste was a recent acquisition on De Carabas’s part. Funny, but dying had made him more prone to thinking about the injustices of the world, whereas before he might have sauntered past, unfazed.

He headed for a man in a clear plastic raincoat who stood guard over the waiting line of new slaves. Even from several feet away, the Marquis caught the stench of body odour and urine and had to force himself to smile rather than grimace, though the resultant expression was neither one nor the other. It was said that some of the Rat Speakers after a while began to resemble rats themselves from so much contact with them, and if so, then this man might have been amongst of their number once. His face was pointy and sharp, with small eyes and a few straggly hairs beneath his wedge-shaped nose that were failing miserably to become a moustache. He leered at the crowd, not really watching his charges at all, but then they were both chained and so hideously brow-beaten that none of them stood a chance of escape. As his gaze swept over the faces around him, though, the rat-man caught sight of de Carabas, and the smile dropped from his lips like lard dripping off a strip of bacon.

The Marquis returned a look of his own, one that said, ‘you will come here and speak to me or you’ll look back on this day as the worst of your life’, and the little man shuffled uneasily, glanced about as if checking no one was watching, then slipped away into the crowd. De Carabas tracked him as he sidled past the onlookers and finally came to the spot where the Marquis had paused.

‘What are you doing here?’ he rasped. ‘If Dyspepsia sees you here, she’ll…’

‘Then it’s in your interests to come with me,’ said de Carabas lazily. ‘Otherwise I’ll say what I have to say here.’ He nodded towards the large woman. ‘She seemed busy enough. Perhaps she won’t see you talking to me.’

The rat-man hissed through his prominent front teeth and gestured to a doorway between two stalls nearby. De Carabas gave the slave auction one last sneer then followed after him. Ducking beneath the lintel, he stepped through into a long corridor, where a few people drifted past on their way to somewhere more interesting, but there were no stalls or attractions to make anyone want to linger.

‘All right,’ said the slaver. ‘What do you want?’

‘A while ago, Shadwell, I saved you from a very nasty encounter with the Seven Sisters,’ said de Carabas.

‘Don’t remind me,’ muttered Shadwell.

‘Oh, but that’s precisely what I’m here to do. Remind you of it. You owe me a favour. A big favour. Two in fact, if you include making sure your boss in there never found out what you were doing with the Sisters in the first place.’

‘All right, all right. I knew you’d come one day. What is it you’re after? Servants? Or is it a bit of…’ Shadwell cocked his head to one side and gave what he probably thought was a lewd and suggestive smile, running his greenish tongue over his almost non-existent lips, but it really just made him look like he was having some sort of episode.

‘I’ve no time for you or your business,’ said the Marquis, ‘and I want nothing to do with it. But I’ve heard rumours, Shadwell, rumours that your boss has found something a little more special than her usual group of runaways and wretches.’

Shadwell straightened and went back to checking for eavesdroppers all around him. ‘How did you hear that?’

‘Not important. You know what I’m talking about? Has she found it or not?’

Shadwell squirmed and his plastic coat squeaked. Parts of it were steamed up from the heat of his sweaty little body and it clung to any part of him where the skin was exposed.

‘What’s it to you?’ he asked.

‘I want it,’ said de Carabas. ‘You owe me, Shadwell, so you’ll get it for me.’

‘Can’t.’

The Marquis, for the briefest instant, was lost for words. ‘Can’t’ was not a response he was used to. ‘Then perhaps Dyspepsia and I need to have a little chat about your extracurricular activities in…’

‘I’m not trying to be funny with you,’ Shadwell insisted. ‘I mean it, I can’t get it for you. It’s already gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘Sold. You think something like that would hang about for long? Dyspepsia had a private buyer lined up before she was even sure it was bona fide.’

‘But she is sure it’s the real thing?’ de Carabas asked.

‘Certain. Saw it meself. There’s no question of it.’

‘Who bought it?’

Shadwell hesitated.

‘Who?’ de Carabas insisted.

‘I shouldn’t tell you this. If she found out I’d blabbed, it’d be more than my life’s worth…’

‘I’ve scraped things off the sole of my boots that were worth more than your life, Shadwell, so that’s hardly a protest. And there’s no reason Dyspepsia need find out how the information came my way, is there? Whereas, if you don’t tell me, she most certainly will find out about the Sisters and the rather large tub of…’

‘All right,’ said Shadwell. ‘But you have to give me your word you won’t tell her it was me what told you, right?’

‘Agreed.’

After checking for listeners again – the Marquis wondered if the man was capable of being still or if he was just a mass of continuous, paranoid tics – Shadwell exhaled and scratched his head.

‘Couple of fellows came to get it. I don’t know who the buyer was, but I did hear them say they were taking it to the Arsenal.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Positive.’

De Carabas cursed inside his head, but all that registered on the outside was a slight flicker of annoyance. He hated the Arsenal.

‘Very well.’

‘Does this make us square?’ Shadwell called after him as he turned to leave.

‘That settles our account as far as keeping Dyspepsia in the dark is concerned,’ said de Carabas. ‘You still owe me for your life.’

Shadwell gave a sort of ‘fair enough’ shrug and shoved his hands into the pocket of his sticky raincoat.

‘Well,’ he mumbled as de Carabas strode off down the hallway, ‘you did say it weren’t worth much.’

***

Of the various groups who made their homes around the shadowy corners of London Below, the Gunners were amongst the Marquis’s least favourites. He tried to keep his dealings with them to a minimum and so far had been successful. It wasn’t that they were particularly dangerous or that any of them wanted, so far as he knew, to kill him. They were just _irritating._

He had never quite discerned their origins but most seemed to have drifted in from various wars throughout the centuries. On his previous visits, he’d seen everything from a Celtic warrior with swirling blue face tattoos and an auburn beard the size of a badger, to a couple of young men with enormous moustaches, in dark blue jumpsuits and leather jackets, chatting together in some strange patois, something about buying farms near the Wash. What they all shared, however, was a tedious love of all things soldierly. Though the tube station in London Above might have been named, via the football team, for the repository of weapons at Woolwich, in London Below, the Arsenal held only a vast collection of boring war stories. Still, he wasn’t there to chat this time. In fact, it would be considerably more in his favour if none of the Gunners even realised he’d been there at all.

Heading along a brick-lined tunnel, he knew exactly when he was nearing the Arsenal because he could hear them, voices drifting down the passageway like slivers of sewer water. One of their songs about marching to places and killing things. Then again, all of their songs were about marching to places and killing things. That is, they did not so much sing as shout things that rhymed. The one now haunting the tunnel was something to do with Napoleon, and they were struggling, being several dozens of verses in, to find things that rhymed with ‘Wellington’ but that didn’t seem to be putting them off.

Eventually the tunnel turned a subtle curve and up ahead, he saw a set of large, wooden gates, firmly closed but with a gap at the top, just enough to show that each gate was topped with iron spikes. The war chant seeped through this space and the ground shook with the rhythmic stomping of feet. A small plaque on one side of the gates read, ‘The Arsenal – Ring for Attention’. A rope dangled nearby, probably connected to a bell, but de Carabas had no intention of announcing his presence. He steeled himself and tried to remember the techniques Door had taught him recently, before he pressed a hand against the wood of the gate, took a deep breath, and pushed it open.

On the other side was a courtyard surrounded by high, brick walls, with battlement-like walkways about thirty feet up, going around all sides. The ground was cobbled and the stones shone in the light of several torches burning around the place, slick with water tramped in from the tunnels and worn shiny by centuries of booted feet marching past on parades. The Marquis had emerged in the shadow of the archway that contained the main gate and so could stay hidden for a second until he had closed the gate behind him and was sure no one was patrolling the yard, either at ground level or above. Directly ahead, the windows set in one of the walls glowed golden and shadowy figures moved in time with the chant. By the sounds of it, and from the smell of beer hanging around the place like a fog, most of the Gunners were quite happily occupied in there. De Carabas heard tankards being clanked together and more stomping feet.

High up on the wall to his right was the only other lighted window in the place. The Marquis had just decided this was his best bet and had started towards that building, when a scream cut through the darkness from that window. De Carabas smiled. He was right then.

It occurred to him, as he hurried across the open courtyard, not slowing until he was safely wrapped in the darkness of an archway in the corner where he assumed he’d find the entrance, that this was not one of the many places he’d speculated he might end up on this quest of his. The Marquis had no idea why the Gunners would be interested in the thing he was searching for, but then as he started up the spiral staircase inside the Arsenal walls, he realised he didn’t care. All that mattered was acquiring it before the fools had the chance to do too much damage.

He didn’t need to search each floor of the building as by the time he’d passed three doorways leading off the stairwell, he’d heard several more screams from above. On the fourth landing, they were no longer muffled by stone and wood and air and so he reasoned that the room he was looking for was on this level.

He made his way slowly but not too cautiously along the hallway. He had his persona to think about and the Marquis de Carabas was not one to sneak around like a mouse. He passed closed doors with little windows covered in iron grilles, through which he glimpsed racks of pikestaffs, stands full of broadswords bigger than some people he knew, shelves of gas masks that stared back with blank, round eyes, and even complete suits of armour. Right at the far end, light spilled out across the floor from an open doorway so even before the next scream rang out, de Carabas knew where he was going. It occurred to him, however, that he actually didn’t have a plan. Not having known where he was going had limited his options in that respect, and even now he didn’t really know what might be waiting through that doorway. He’d worked with less in the past though, he reasoned, and improvisation was just one of the many things he was really quite superb at.

Just beyond the open door, the corridor turned ninety degrees, presumably to head off around the next stretch of the Arsenal’s quadrangle, but de Carabas thought the turn was close enough to the door to give a good vantage point but still far enough away that he could keep out of sight of those inside the room. It would mean passing the open doorway, but he could move as silently as a stray thought when he wanted to.

As he made the quick dash from one patch of shadowy hall to the next, trying not to stay in the light from the room for more than a heartbeat, he stole a glance inside and counted two figures, both standing with their backs to the door, looking down at something, though they hid it from de Carabas’s view. Oddly, neither was in any kind of military uniform.

The Marquis took up his post around the corner and pressed his back against the wall. The next stretch of hallway was suitably dark and unoccupied and would, if necessary, give a ready escape route. Though he could see into the room, the two men were right at the very back and so were ought of sight, but he could hear one of them at least.

‘I’m not sure what you hope to achieve by this,’ he was saying. His voice was cultured, haughty, not unlike the Marquis’s own, but there was the fringe of an unplaceable accent around the edges. ‘The longer you remain silent, the longer this unpleasantness continues. Tell me how it works. And as I’ve told you already, our employer has told us to use as much force as we wish and to do to you whatever we wish. I don’t know what you did to make them hate you this much, but they are determined to have their revenge. It needn’t be prolonged too much, however, if you’re willing to co-operate.’

Either the subject being questioned didn’t respond, or they answered in a voice too low for the Marquis’s ears. A long silence followed. Then the man with the accent sighed.

‘I take it it does speak,’ he said.

‘No idea,’ replied his companion, who sounded like he had a cold.

Somewhere outside, someone blew a complicated tune on a bugle, and the notes cut crisp across the night and the dark. They silenced the two men in the room. After the short blast of music, the man with the accent cursed.

‘Officers’ call,’ he said. ‘We’d best show face or they’ll come looking. Make sure it’s covered and put out the candles.’

De Carabas listened to the scuffles and footsteps in the room and saw the pool of light leaking into the hall grow steadily dimmer as the candles were put out, then the two emerged. The taller one, who wore a black suit with a green cravat, had silver hair that fell to his shoulders, and wore steel-rimmed spectacles on the end of his aquiline nose.

‘Fetch those uniforms,’ he ordered his companion. He was the one with the accent. ‘Quickly.’

The other man, smaller and dressed in a mismatch of clothes all tied at the waist with a rope, hurried off, thankfully towards the stairwell de Carabas had used, so that their paths didn’t cross. The grey-haired man turned his back to the Marquis’s hiding place and there was a sound of several locks clicking into place. The man then swept a glance around the corridor as if he could sense he was being watched, before he slipped a heavy iron key into his inside pocket and strode off after his friend.

De Carabas waited until he could no longer hear their footsteps on the stairs before he approached the door. It was now locked, he realised, but that was of little consequence. He might not have entirely mastered Door’s techniques but he did have a handy lockpicking kit in one of the pockets of his coat. The lock was complicated but it still only took a matter of seconds.

With the candles snuffed and still smoking, the only light fell in through a large, barred window on the far side, and must have come from the torches in the courtyard below. It was faint, but enough to make out where there were solid objects in the room, if not what they were. Finding a matchbox on a table, de Carabas relit one of the still-warm candles then took a moment to inspect the place.

Each wall was lined with racks of various sharp and vicious-looking things, the sort of weaponry any self-respecting medieval castle couldn’t do without, but more importantly, where the two men had been standing, there was a cube-shaped object, about four feet long in all directions, covered by a black velvet cloth that spilled out across the floor around it like ink. As de Carabas approached, he heard the faintest swish of something moving underneath and paused a second, waiting to see if whatever it was would do anything, make a sound, cry out and give him away, but the silence fell back upon the room almost instantly.

He stooped down to grab the edge of the cloth, then with the flourish of a stage magician, pulled the cover away from the object beneath.

It was a cage, made from strips of metal about an inch wide crossed to form a grid and riveted together, but de Carabas had never seen material like it before. As the candle flickered and the metal reflected the light, it looked like gold one moment, silver the next, then copper, and seemed to be either a mixture of all three or else something entirely unknown to him. Inside was a figure, dressed in the tattered remains of a robe that caught the candlelight in a strange way, so that the fabric seemed to glow, even where it was torn and stained. The figure was human, or at least it appeared so, and from the length of its legs, it must have been tall, but was forced to sit hunched in the small cage, its knees pressed to its chest and its head drooped. Dark curls, tangled and matted in places with what looked like blood, covered its face. Its skin was deathly pale, save where bruises blossomed dark red and purple.

De Carabas grinned.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’


	2. 2.

The angel raised its head slowly and regarded de Carabas with eyes that were just too dark to be human and a look that said it would happily have torn his throat out, were it not for the bars of that strange metal keeping it prisoner. The Marquis fought to hide his shock at the sight of the creature. It was, he reflected, still quite the most exquisitely beautiful being he’d ever beheld, but its flawless skin was scarred and bruised. A painful-looking cut ran from the corner of one elegant, dark eyebrow to the top of a stunning cheekbone and patches of dried blood stained its neck and shoulder. De Carabas hadn’t even known angels could bleed. You learn something new every day.

‘What?’ he said with a smile. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

The angel glowered but said nothing. De Carabas laughed and wandered around the room, making a great show of inspecting the daggers, swords and other instruments of torture about the place. Quite a few lying out on the tables nearby were dulled with blood. These were also inscribed with symbols that reminded de Carabas of a book he’d read recently, one he’d stolen from the Blackfriars. The weapons, he assumed, had been augmented to inflict harm on an angel.

‘You should be,’ the Marquis went on. ‘Unless, of course, you’d rather stay here with your new friends, though you’ll forgive me for saying, they don’t seem to like you very much.’

He found a pikestaff that looked promising and took it from one of the wall racks. The angel’s eyes widened just slightly as he walked past with it. De Carabas tutted and shook his head.

‘Do you really think I’d be so… inelegant?’ he asked, then jammed the pike against the room’s door. It wouldn’t hold for long, but it would give enough time to escape, if any of the Gunners, or whoever those other two were, decided to return.

‘I must say,’ the Marquis continued, sauntering back to the cage, ‘when I first heard the whispers that you’d been found, I thought it couldn’t be true. Door sent him away, I thought. We’ve seen the last of him. Then again, I thought, if anyone can crawl his way out of the void and turn up again to cause havoc, then it would be you. Though you do seem somewhat… diminished.’

‘For now,’ said the angel quietly.

‘Ah, so you do still have your voice. Excellent. Negotiations are tedious if they’re one sided and I despise mime.’

‘Negotiations?’

De Carabas crouched on his haunches by the cage so that he and the angel were level with each other. ‘My speciality.’

‘What could you possibly offer me?’

‘Something it would seem you sorely lack,’ said de Carabas.He tapped the bars of the cage. ‘Your freedom.’

The angel cocked its head to one side and watched him with a quizzical expression for a while, then smiled icily.

‘You would set me free?’

‘For a price.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ asked the angel. Its voice was still as soft and calm as the Marquis remembered but it was slightly hoarse too, perhaps from all the screaming.

‘Suit yourself, though you might consider the alternative.’ He made a vague gesture around the room, indicating the various weapons.

‘As you say,’ the angel replied, ‘I am diminished. I have nothing to give in return.’

‘Now, that’s not quite true, is it?’ De Carabas grinned. ‘So what do you say? I can have you out of here in a thrice.’

He could see the angel thinking it over, weighing up its options, calculating the risks, but then he’d done the same before setting off on this enterprise.

‘Well?’ he prompted.

‘You haven’t told me what you want,’ said the angel.

‘One moon,’ answered de Carabas, ‘after which you can do as you choose. But for one moon, you will answer to me, be bonded to me and do as I say. In return I will see you safely out of here and I will guarantee your freedom at the end of the month.’

The angel nodded, smiling. ‘One month, during which time you intend to ask for exactly the same thing these creatures want.’

‘I presume so,’ said de Carabas. ‘However, I give you my word you won’t be seriously harmed. I doubt these two can say the same. And I doubt they intend to give you anything in return. Mine is by far the better offer.’

‘I can’t give you what you want, no more than I can give it to them,’ said the angel.

‘We’ll see.’

De Carabas waited, his gaze locked unwaveringly on the angel until, finally, he saw the creature sag just a little and knew he’d won.

‘If you betray me,’ the angel said, ‘I will destroy you.’

‘I’m sure. Does that mean we have a deal?’

After another moment’s hesitation, the angel nodded.

‘Excellent,’ said de Carabas, getting to his feet. The lid of the cage was secured by a large padlock, which he’d noted on his first inspection of the room, and now the Marquis set about removing it. It was a few seconds’ work, then he slipped his lockpicking kit back into one of the many pockets of his coat, lifted the lid and held out a hand to the angel. It seemed wary at first but then reached up. When it tried to stand, however, it trembled and lost its balance, but de Carabas was there and wrapped an arm around its waist before it fell. Gathering it up, he lifted it clear of the cage and took it to one of the tables, where he could let it rest for a second while he rummaged in the pockets of his coat. He hadn’t envisaged having to carry the creature like a child when he’d come up with this plan but once again, _superbly good at improvising!_

He took out a photograph of a room with dark décor and furnishings, lots of heavy jacquard curtains, gold trim and crimson-coloured velvet. Then, holding it in one hand, he concentrated and prepared himself for the unpleasant sensations the journey would bring. It might have been a quick way to travel around, as well as a good way of hiding one’s location, but Door’s family’s trick of moving in and out of rooms through photographs was a little hard on the senses. Ghosts from each part of London Below that he swept through tried to assail him with sound and images and feelings, so many and so varied that it all became an hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of faces and rooms and sounds and tastes, until he brain hurt from the constant bombardment. Door had said you got used to it, but the Marquis wasn’t so sure. Though he would never admit to having less resilience than the little auburn-haired, elfin-faced girl he’d once accompanied throughout the under-city.

Luckily, the journey lasted only a few seconds, but it took the Marquis a few moments more to adjust to his new surroundings and for the world to stop spinning. Perhaps that was just his head. He felt sick but controlled himself. He thought the angel might have passed out. It certainly seemed to have grown heavier since the Arsenal, but as de Carabas started across the room, it moaned softly and stirred, raising its head to look around.

‘What is this place?’ it asked.

‘Somewhere safe,’ said the Marquis. In fact, it was one of several little bolt holes he kept around London and told no one about, not only to hide himself away in times of danger but also in those times when the company of other people was like sandpaper to him. The house, in reality, was beyond the High Gate, but that little idea of Door’s really made it simpler to keep track of all his places and to flit from one to the other easily. Or quickly, if not easily.

The room where he’d arrived was, like the photograph, dark and sumptuous, a mixture of styles that from one angle evoked the decadence of the Ancien Régime and suggested powdered wigs tossed upon the floor and stockings draped over the back of the chaise-longue, and from another became a gothic castle, where the household might rise to the desolate toll of a bell, and where there would be at least one room set aside for a coffin.

The candles were already lit in their gilded holders, some with mirrors placed behind them to throw more light into the room, and so there were always shadows dancing around the ceiling, but the air below always seemed to be made of gold.

The Marquis carried the angel over to a couch and laid it down, and saw then the real extent of its injuries. Its long, plain, white robe was dark brown across its midriff, and through a tear in the cloth he saw the edges of several ragged wounds. There were marks around its wrists and ankles where it had been bound, and long cuts down the inside of its upper arms. De Carabas imagined those had been done with a long-bladed knife, and the blood collected in a bowl underneath. Whoever those two at the Arsenal were, they were certainly after the same thing he was. Their methods, however, was unspeakably crude.

‘Can you heal yourself?’ he asked.

The angel had closed its eyes and he wondered for a second if it had fallen asleep, then wondered if angels actually slept at all, but then it nodded, though its eyes remained shut.

‘How long?’

‘A few hours,’ the angel said. Its voice was hoarser than before. Part of de Carabas suspected some of the angel’s weakness might be feigned, a way either to garner sympathy from its captor or to perhaps lull him into leaving some easy escape route open, but there was no question that it had been tortured in the Arsenal. De Carabas peeled away part of the robe from the angel’s thighs and found more ruler-straight cuts and bruises the colour of port wine around its knees. When he pulled at the fabric covering the angel’s stomach, he found it stiff as cardboard with blood. It tore in his hands and the blood crumbled between his fingers. He grimaced.

At first, he couldn’t make out what the pattern of scars across the angels’ abdomen were, though something in his brain said the marks were familiar, until he took a jug of water from the side table nearby, poured a little over the wound and wiped away some of the mess. They had cut a game of noughts and crosses into the skin. Disgust rose like bile in de Carabas’s throat. The indignity of it appalled him. It was like something Croup and Vandemar might have done. It surprised him, too, as though he’d only seen the two figures at the Arsenal for a second or so, he’d had the impression, in the grey-haired man’s case at least, of someone serious and focused, not the sort who’d mess around like this. But then perhaps he’d got it wrong. He had been wrong before, not that he ever liked to admit it.

The angel had opened its eyes but it stared off to one side, its gaze unfixed, and the Marquis felt a sudden and unwelcome pang of sympathy for it, despite everything it had done. He had never cared for those who enjoyed violence for its own sake. Sometimes you had to kill to survive, that was just how life was, but he could never understand those who wanted to prolong the pain. He admired the likes of Hunter, those who could fight well because he saw the art in what they did, in how they learned to move like water or flash their weapons quick as lightning, how they could assess another’s attack in a fraction of a second and respond. But the ones who laughed and gloated as their victims wept and begged for mercy, those, in the Marquis’s opinion, were scum. 

The thought prompted another question in his mind and he lowered his voice. ‘Did they violate you?’

To his relief, the angel shook its head.

‘Good,’ said the Marquis.

‘I think they might have,’ the angel went on distractedly, ‘if…’ It trailed off and closed its eyes again, looking wearier than ever.

‘Then good thing my timing has always been impeccable,’ said de Carabas, trying to shake himself back into his usual, unfazed, unshakeable self. ‘You can stay here if you like, but I have prepared a room for you.’

When the angel didn’t reply, de Carabas sighed and picked it up again. It felt even heavier now it was losing consciousness, but he only had to carry it a short way across the room to a set of double doors that opened onto a small but equally opulent bedroom. Had the angel said it wanted to stay in the parlour, he would still have brought it here once it was asleep. He’d spent a few days getting it ready and he wasn’t going to waste the effort. Though there was no sign of it in the room now, the Marquis had stripped the place completely bare, down to the rough plaster on the walls and the sanded boards on the floor. He had bricked up the fireplace and the door that led off into another corridor at the back of the house, the only other way out of the room.

Then he had spent hours copying symbols from the old book he’d ‘borrowed’ from the Blackfriars and which had, supposedly, helped them keep the angel safe in its prison for millennia. Finally, he’d enchanted the room’s key, as the book instructed, then replaced the fine wallpapers and curtains and carpet and furnishings until everything appeared exactly as it had been. It had annoyed him to have to do this work himself, but it was the only way to keep the house a secret. If he never saw a bucket of wallpaper paste again in his entire existence, however, it would be too soon.

He laid the angel on the bed, still doubting that it really was as feeble as it made out, but it didn’t resist and simply lay, half-dozing, while he pulled a quilt up to cover it. So much for waging war on Heaven, de Carabas thought, although he felt sure that, had the angel not had to crawl back from wherever Door exiled it to, the odds would be slightly shifted.

‘There’s food on the sideboard,’ he said, not sure if the angel heard or, indeed, if angels needed food. ‘And some wine, too. Rest, and I’ll be back again soon. We have a lot to discuss, Islington.’

He closed the door behind him then turned the key in the lock, saw it glow for a second, then fade back to plain gold.


End file.
